Viewsonic Viewpad 10e initial impressions

Viewsonic have quite a few different tablets. They have budget tablets running Gingerbread, they have tablets running Windows 7 and Android and they have a premium 7″ Honeycomb tablet. The Viewpad 10e is one of the budget devices. You can buy the ViewPad 10e for about £200 from various places like Argos and Amazon. Here are my initial impressions of the tablet. I will do a full review soon, if you want to see anything covered in the final review leave a comment below.

Hardware

First of all here is the spec

1Ghz Cortex A8 Processor

Android 2.3 (Gingerbread)

9.7” IPS LCD 1024 x 768

XGA Brightness 400 cd/m2

Ram DDR3 512 MB

Internal Memory 4GB

Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n

BlueTooth 3.0 and 2.1 + EDR compatibility

External Memory Micro SD card slot

I/O Interface Micro USB

Mini-HDMI

3.5mm headset audio jack

Audio Stereo speakers

G-sensor

Front facing camera 1.3 MP

Battery Li-Polymer 5400mAh

Dimensions 241.6 x 188.6 x 9.1 mm

Weight 620 grams

The best thing about the Viewpad 10e is a 9.7″ IPS screen. Which means it’s nice and bright and the viewing angles are good. The Viewpad is really thin, it’s almost as thin as my Transformer Prime. It weights more though. The built in memory of the Viewpad is 4gb which is split half for storage of apps and half for other things like music or pictures. After I had set up the Viewpad I had 899mb left over. This is great for a budget device like this. Normally you are left with 100mb or something.

The Viewpad has quite good connectivity options, you get a micro sdhc slot, micro hdmi out, bluetooth and wireless n. So you have plenty of options as to what you can do with the tablet. Just beneath the screen are three capacative buttons which are for menu, home and back. Which is handy as the Viewpad runs gingerbread.

One thing I should mention is the finish of the Viewpad. The front of the tablet is great looking. The back is a matt metal which gives it a premium feel. But where this joins the plastic edges of the tablet it is quite harsh. There is also a strip of plastic on the back which probably allows the antennas to get a signal.

Software

Viewsonic have obviously realised that in the current climate they need to have something that is different from the others. So they have decided that SPB Shell 3D or Viewscene 3D as they call it, is going to be their unique selling factor. It certainly helps compared to the stock Gingerbread launcher. You can easily flip between the different launchers. Once you have decided which you prefer you tick the box and choose your preferred and it automatically chooses that each time.

Viewscene 3D does run a little slow if you have lots of widgets and folders and 3d stuff going on. I do like it, you just need to spend a little time setting it up right.

As is fairly commonplace with cheaper tablets the ViewPad doesn’t come with Google apps or the Google Market. It ships with the 1Mobile Market instead. Which interestingly contains a few Google apps. Including Gmail so you can set up your push email. Things like Google earth, YouTube, Angry Birds, Facebook, Google Docs, Astro, Speedx 3D, Google Maps are all there. So you may not get the whole Google experience but for the average user you can certainly find an app to suit.

Conclusion

Overall the Viewpad is pretty good for the money. The 1Mobile Market does a good job of replacing the Android Market. Yes there aren’t as many apps, but the average user will be more than happy. In an ideal world you would download apps on another Android device and just transfer the apk via dropbox or something similar. I easily transferred a few apps over to test it out. If I had two hundred pounds to spend on a tablet this would certainly be in the shortlist of devices.

As I mentioned ealier let us know if you want anything covering in the final review.